


with the roar of the fire (my heart rose to its feet)

by munzie



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Fix-it fic, M/M, canon divergent??, may become a longfic if i can get together the time to write it out, pale solkat rights, pesterquest spoilers for karkat route
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-17
Updated: 2019-10-17
Packaged: 2020-12-21 01:02:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,462
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21066182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/munzie/pseuds/munzie
Summary: karkat takes sollux's advice. it goes better than expected.a canon-diversion extension of karkat's pesterquest bad end!





	with the roar of the fire (my heart rose to its feet)

**Author's Note:**

> i played karkats route this morning and this idea has been living rent free in my brain all day please

You usher him into your hive without fanfare, all wrapped up in his little grey-brown blanket like a three-sweep-old kid. He’s hot to the touch and _ not _ just because he’s been sitting on your doorstep in the middle of the day like a colossal fucking idiot, no - this heat runs deeper, down to the candy blood in his veins. There’s a- a _ thing _ with him, white like a rainbow drinker but without the blinding luminescence, hornless and looking like a lusus was shoved under a steamroller, and when you grab the weird non-troll by its arm it’s even warmer than Karkat is.

He’s still crying as you sit him down in your living room with a glass of iced grub juice, shiny pink tears cascading down his cheeks, and somehow the only thought you can manage in the middle of this unmitigated disaster is _how the fuck has he not been caught yet._ The little alien thing huddles in a corner, poking delicately at one of the software grubs sitting on your floor. Those are _fragile,_ you’re about to say, but Karkat lets out a blood pusher breaking hiccup-sob that drags every other thought out of your head with the precision of a threshecutioner’s sickle. You let the alien do its own thing.

By the time Karkat’s finished his grub juice, his sobs have calmed down into shaky, barely-there breaths. You still want to wipe the tears away from his cheeks, but he’s holding the blanket so tightly you don’t think you could get close enough without spooking him.

Fuck, you’re so pale for him it _ hurts. _

You can’t rub away the pink streaks from his cheeks, so you settle for the next best thing, easing yourself down until you’re sitting on your ankles in front of him. He perches on your couch looking like a cornered animal - which, granted, you kind of understand. Amidst the chaos and the whole harboring a fugitive situation, you haven’t really gotten the whole story out of him yet, but you’re sure it can’t be anything good.

“You’re going to get _ culled,” _ he says, voice breaking on __the last word. “You’re going to get culled and it’s all my fault, I have to get out of here-”

It’s only sheer proximity that lets you wrap your arms around him before he bolts. He’s burning hot to the touch, fever-warm even through the blanket and the layers of his shirt. You pull him tight into your chest, blanket and all, and the two of you sink to the floor together in a shivering heap.

“You’re on the insta-cull lists,” you say after a long moment, as if he doesn’t know.

“I’m a mutant,” he replies, as if _ you _ don’t know.

God. A couple of sad sacks you are, cullbait and helmsbait too far up their own nooks to sort out their own selves, much less anyone else.

* * *

It takes a while, but Karkat eventually loosens up enough for you to pry the blanket from his grip, pushing it back from his head enough that you can see the tangled curls of his hair, the hard barely-there nubs of his horns. You’re careful not to brush up against his skin - as nice as the warmth is when you’re freezing your ass off out here underneath the artifical sky, you think it might spook him back into his earlier panic. Some quiet, self-serving voice in the back of your head tells you to pap him if he starts to wind himself up again. You firmly ignore it. Now isn’t the time for grand pale overtures, not when Karkat’s got that look in his eyes like he’ll tear the arms off the next drone he sees.

You’ve got him almost fully calmed back down when an ominous _ click-click-whirr _ starts up outside, and the fear floods back into Karkat’s face like a dam breaking. You reach out, pin him with your arms again even though he’s writhing around like an eel.

“Let me _ go, _ you fucking nookbiter,” he hisses out at you, spitting the words from between gritted teeth. “No sense in _ both _ of us getting culled, stop being such a fucking martyr-”

“Oh, like you’re one to talk?”

“It’ll fucking find me here, you blistering shitstain, I have to get underground-”

The clicking grows louder. You don’t have _ time _for this.

You hiss a breath in through your teeth. “How did you hide before?”

“Temperature-masking crawlspace,” he says matter-of-factly, the angry tenor of his voice pitching manic when the clicking and whirring gets louder. “At least until _ this one-” _he jerks his head towards the alien thing, balled up inside its cerulean sweatshirt and waving hesitantly. “came in with me and overheated the fucking thing.”

The alien’s weird white eyes go wide with realization, and it just fucking-

Pops out of existence. Snap. Just like that.

“Huh,” you say, and Karkat echoes you. Can all aliens do that?

There’s no real time to think over the hows and whys of alien powers, though, because you can _ hear _the drone kicking in your front door, three flights of stairs down. Bicyclops kicks up a shitfit on the roof, anxious to get down to you but still very much chained up (you hope) -- and that gives you a bit of an idea.

“KK,” you say, hissing low and urgent so the drone doesn’t hear you. It’s banging around in your nutrition block, probably kicking over chairs and breaking your nicely organized jars of grub jelly. Fuck drones, man. 

_ Fuck _ drones.

Karkat is hardly listening, still scrabbling around like a little purrbeast trying to get free of your grip so that he can bolt, and you wrap tight around him like a vice. It’s half to get his attention and half to keep him in place, and it does a decent enough job at both that you can pat his cheek - _ not _ a pap, you keep it light and impersonal enough to avoid throwing him into a pale coma - to get him the other half of the way to lucid. 

“KK,” you repeat, more hurried now that you can hear the drone making its way up the first flight of steps. “KK, listen to me. I’m putting you in the beehive.”

“_ What.” _

“It’s warmer than you are, it’ll hide you, just-” You root around a little bit underneath your desk until you come up with an old shirt, promptly tearing a strip of fabric off just wide enough to cover up his mouth with. His eyes go wide and you shush him gently, wincing inwardly at the pale display. “Keep this over your mouth so you don’t eat the honey. And for the love of fuck, _ stay quiet.” _

The drone slams its way up the stairs faster than you would like it to, and you set to work hollowing out the beehive with your psionics while Karkat ties the fabric over his mouth. You’ve just barely managed to wrap him up in his blanket and bundle him into the empty hive when the drone slams its fist against your door.

With one last cursory glance at the hive to make sure none of Karkat’s body parts are showing, you wrench open the door and stare down the hulking drone.

It takes about a half second look at you, scanning you from head to toe before forcing all nine-odd feet of itself through the doorway and into your respiteblock. Thank _ fuck _ you had the sense to pull the imperial database off your computer screen when Karkat came in, because even if you had managed to hide him well enough, that would have gotten _ you _ on the cull-on-sight list, and then where would the two of you be?

The drone ignores you as it sweeps through your respiteblock, kicking through your wires and dislodging your monitors. For a creature bred for precision hunting and careful pail transportation, you really don’t think this one is all that graceful about searching your quarters. It stops at the throwing stars embedded in your wall from your last bout of mania-induced target practice, squinting at them before deciding they aren’t dangerous enough to warrant a cull warning.

Your breath catches in your throat when it swings its attention over to your beehive - you inhale imperceptibly through your nostrils and refuse to breathe out as the drone inspects Karkat’s hiding place. You hid him well enough, right? You keep the hive hotter than Aradia running a fever even without the extra heat added from hooking it up to your computers, there’s no way the drone could detect a mutantblood in the middle of that.

Still, it takes its sweet fucking time going over the hive, poking and prodding it with an extended claw and sniffing curiously at the honey. It makes another _ click-click-whirr _ at a bee that dares to get too close. Finally, _ thankfully, _ it pulls back, and the breath rushes back into your lungs with a force that leaves you light-headed. Bicyclops kicks at the ceiling above your head, and the drone chitters something in response that you can’t understand. It holds out a hand, long and armor-plated and clawed like a killer, and deposits one sparkly pink kiss-mark sticker onto the ground in front of you.

With that, it’s gone, stepping out of your respiteblock onto the balcony and floating off into your neighbor’s hive.

* * *

Your blood pusher is dancing a whole fucking tango in your chest as you pull Karkat delicately from the hive, shaking and sopping wet with honey. The blanket is a lost cause, you suppose, but as you bundle him downstairs and into your ablution trap you rub gentle circles into the dry patches over his shoulders, hoping the contact soothes him as much as it soothes you. He purrs at you - it’s barely audible, but you can feel it through the places where you’re connected skin-on-fabric-on-skin, and eventually neither of you are shivering with fear and anxiety. 

You turn on the ablution trap, setting the spray at a comforting warmth and ushering Karkat in - you go to leave, to give him some privacy, but he hides himself behind the curtain and grabs at the fabric of your shirt with one outstretched hand.

So you stay.

You sit on the floor facing the doorway, back pressed up against your load gaper as Karkat huddles on the floor of your ablution trap. Vaguely, you think he might be crying, little hiccuping sobs barely audible over the water spray, but you don’t dare ask him if he’s alright. You both know the answer to that question.

Somewhere in the back of your head, the fear still nags at you. Could you have hidden Karkat away with any less time? Could you get away with doing it again, if the drone decides to come back?

Would anyone else even bother to help him hide?

Half of you wants to keep him safe now that you’ve pulled off your little stunt once, but the more rational half knows you can’t get away with carrying in rations for two growing trolls, and the hive trick won’t work once Karkat starts to moult out of his adolescent body. You’ve heard stories, of course, of trolls who run off in the light of day to live off the grid and out of reach of the drones - could Karkat manage that? Could you help him?

Somehow, all the drama packed into your everyday life - Flarp, fiduspawn, your friends getting together and breaking up and throwing each other off cliffs - it all feels so inconsequential suddenly. Your worldview has opened up and narrowed at the same time, tunnel vision fixated on keeping your best friend alive in the face of all odds.

At least you were never one to back down from a problem.

* * *

When Karkat finally pulls himself from the ablution trap, soaked and shivering, he wraps himself in the towel you had left for him and pads back into your respite block without you. Your clothes don’t quite fit him - you’re too tall and skinny, he’s shorter and stockier by far - but he pulls them on all the same, rolling up the cuffs of the pajama pants four times before they finally sit comfortably at his ankles. Your blood pusher does a number at the sight of him in your sign, in your colors. Trust your stupid, one-track thinkpan for flipping over pale at that even when the two of you had faced down death less than an hour before.

You expect him to make a beeline for the recuperacoon, to settle the fuck in and go to sleep, but he starts to putter around your respiteblock instead. His first stop is the balcony door, pulling the curtain tight across it so he isn’t visible from the outside before bending down to scoop up a tangle of unused wires sitting on the floor. He tosses them into an empty corner and continues on, picking through your belongings and throwing the smaller items aside with the wires, as you stand and watch in bemused silence.

It takes you, genius hacker that you are, _ far _ too long to realize he’s making a _ pile. _

“Is that-” you start, and he snaps his head up at you, freezing with the disc case for a shitty comedy movie in one hand. His grey skin is tinged pink, his eyes wide and puffy.

“Shut up,” he retorts, and you do. “Get over here.”

You do that, too.

When you sink into the pile, Karkat follows you, curling himself into your side like he’s done this a hundred times already despite the fact that you’re frozen up from the unfamiliarity of it all. You drape an arm around him robotically, keeping a comfortable distance between your skin and his, pushing off the urge to pap him in case this isn’t the pale overture you’re taking it for. You don’t have time for this, and you know it, but maybe it’s okay just for the day.

Tomorrow, you’ll sort out the future. Tomorrow, you’ll figure out how to keep Karkat alive long enough to get him to safety, and you’ll either sort out this quadrant bullshit once and for all or resign yourself to finally getting over your childhood crush. Tomorrow, you’ll throw yourself into planning and plotting, and maybe you’ll enlist a couple of your more trustworthy friends to help you with the impossible task ahead of you.

For today, though, you’ll run your fingers through Karkat’s hair and watch as he drifts off into uneasy sleep, bundling him into the left half of your recuperacoon with your psionics and climbing as silently as possible into the right.

You fall into sleep fitfully, uneasily, and then far better when Karkat reaches out and takes your hand in his.

  


**Author's Note:**

> leave me comments/kudos please -- if this fic gets love i'll probably turn it into an ancestor-parallel longfic!! 
> 
> oh, and catch me on twitter at [caledscratch](https://twitter.com/caiedscratch)!


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